Aeriform
by petrous
Summary: Alfred had a life plan, and being kidnapped to pilot a war machine wasn't in it. Thrown in the deep end with a group of other teenagers with twitchy trigger fingers and strangely blank histories, he finds he can't even remember his home and family. What's worse, he knows he was meant to play the hero for someone very important, and he can't even remember their face. (Eventual USUK)
1. Chapter 1

Alfred dialed up a bubbler from the living room food dispenser with only one ear open. It was a self-defense measure.

"…thirty klicks from the bloody front lines, no outside safe-parks, net connection like a three-legged tortoise–"

"All right, all _right,_" Alfred said, as the machine beeped, cutting off Arthur's stream of complaints. He sprawled on the sofa, sucking the drink from a straw, his head close to Arthur's leg but definitely, definitely not touching.

Arthur was sitting bolt upright on the edge of the seat as usual and glaring down at Alfred. Alfred tried to grin up at him, but they'd had this argument too many times, and it was the reason he couldn't do what he desperately wanted to do, which was rest his head on Arthur's knee and complain about homework. School. Normal things for a fifteen-year-old.

The glare wasn't letting up. Alfred offered a sip of his bubbler as a sacrifice to peace, but Arthur pushed it away. He had soft, sandy hair covering his forearm, and Alfred wondered what it would feel like to touch.

He couldn't, though, because it would complicate things. Alfred sighed. "Look, I _know_," he said. "You don't want me to take the West Twelve placement, okay, I _get_ it. But I gotta. You don't understand. If I don't get warzone experience, my chances of getting on the military-medico branch are a big fat zero."

"I understand perfectly, you idiot," Arthur snapped. "Haven't you been _listening_ to me?"

"Nope," Alfred said cheerfully. Usually Arthur would poke him in the ribs in exasperation. But this time Arthur just tightened one hand around his school reader and the other on his knee, and looked almost closed-off. Alfred pushed himself off the sofa cushion and sat up uneasily. "Tell me again."

Arthur turned his reader around and shoved it at Alfred. "Look at this," he said, "since there seems to be bubbler in your ears."

Alfred frowned down at it. "An acceptance certificate?" he said. "For _tactics analyst training?_ You hate tactics!"

"It was the only program with spaces open," Arthur said shortly. "And my tactics marks are excellent. May I remind you I got 96% in standardized testing?"

"Yeah, and that was your _lowest mark_," Alfred said, elbowing aside the cushion so he could pore over the reader more closely. "Hey, this program is in Cidome West Twelve!"

"Congratulations," Arthur said. "You've demonstrated basic reading skills. If you'd worked on your bloody listening-to-what-your-best-friend is saying skills, you might have had that revelation five minutes ago."

Alfred barely heard. He was too busy staring in dismay. It was one thing that _he _might go to a cidome in the war zone, but the moment he thought of Arthur there too, his chest constricted. The Elite were merciless with the cidomes they took. He looked at Arthur, the tense curve of his arm as he gripped his knees, his face so set in its hostile lines that only Alfred could read the uncertainty underneath. In his mind he saw Arthur choking in paralyzing gas, grimly working at an interface while hull breach alarms sounded, thrown from a tunnel train – "_No_," he said.

Arthur took the reader back. "Too late," he said. "I'm on the program."

"You wanted to go into politics!" Alfred said.

"I don't bloody care," Arthur said. "Maybe you should have thought twice before leaving me behind and putting yourself in a _warzone_."

"You did this just to follow me," Alfred said slowly. Freezing dismay was creeping through him like a tide. It made sense. They'd been close and getting closer. Both of them had mutually stopped dating a year ago, spending every school day and evening together instead. Whenever they touched, one of them jumped away, as if the electric awareness of each other was crossing some unspoken line. It had been the hardest decision Alfred had made in years to take a placement away from Arthur, even if it was only for six months. He'd thought he would get his warzone experience, come home after the risky six months was up, and ask Arthur… ask Arthur… something.

"Don't get all puffed up over it," Arthur said. He sounded grouchy, but Alfred could hear the smugness under that. Usually it made Alfred roll his eyes affectionately. Right now it made him feel sick. He'd just screwed up Arthur's career plans and pulled him into a warzone. He hadn't even meant to.

"I'm coming back!" he said. "You don't have to do this. I'll be back in six months!"

"I don't care," Arthur snapped. "If something happened to you, and I wasn't there, I'd never forgive myself. You're—"

He broke off. Alfred's heart was pounding, and blood thumped in his ears in the space where the next words should have been.

It came on him like a flash, a solution so perfect and awful that he could feel his gorge rise. The bubbler taste in his mouth was turning to acid. He dropped the half-empty drink on the table.

"Is this all 'cause you think we're gonna date?" he made himself say.

Arthur froze. He wasn't attractive when he froze, pale in shock with eyebrows bristling, his arms awkwardly splayed in the act of putting his reader away. Alfred still wanted nothing so much as to kiss him and smooth the shock away, but he didn't. That would just make Arthur follow him into somewhere he might get killed. Alfred had already messed this up enough.

"I don't—" Arthur said, all words apparently deserting him. "I didn't–"

They Didn't Talk About Dating. It would be weird.

Well, this had just got past _weird_.

"We're not gonna," Alfred said. He tried to look Arthur in the eye, to add some conviction, but he couldn't meet his gaze. He had to jump up and pace in the tiny living room. "Look, I know we've been – sort of wondering, but this isn't gonna work. I don't want to just start dating the guy I knew from high school. There's a whole world out there. I've got options," he added, and then hated himself for it. His throat hurt. His heart hurt.

"I," Arthur said, and then swallowed. "I. You don't – I see."

"So there's no point," Alfred said. He seized his drink for something to do with his hands, felt too sick to drink it, and waved it in a half-baked dramatic gesture. "You should withdraw from that program."

"Withdraw," Arthur repeated. There was something off in his voice, something tiny but wrong, like a hangnail pulled until it bled.

"Yes!" Alfred said. "I don't—" He had to say it. Better Arthur never got hurt in the first place than he risked becoming one of the victims on Alfred's training vids. Maybe this was what it meant to be heroic. He had to take a breath, because it felt like he hadn't breathed in minutes. "I don't want you following me."

"Of course not," Arthur said colorlessly. He got to his feet slowly, like his skin had been sand-blasted and the touch of the air around him hurt. He gave Alfred a last, lost look and turned towards the door.

Alfred nearly grabbed his arm. His hand was an inch away from his side before he stopped himself.

Arthur programmed the door to let himself out. "You don't have to go," Alfred said.

"I have to get back," Arthur said, sliding his ID out his sleeve. He seemed engrossed in scanning it.

"Come on, we've still got a week." Alfred said helplessly. "We can still be in touch even when I'm gone."

"Very bloody likely," Arthur snarled. "When you'll be having dinner with all your _options_." He let the door shut behind him. The corridor elevator went with a _clank_.

Alfred called fifteen times that night. Arthur's terminal wasn't receiving.

He prepared for the move in a haze of misery, sorting his possessions for the meager twenty-kilo allowance they had. He called Arthur every day, then every two days, and then another eight times on the last day. Arthur never picked up.

Alfred watched his _Introduction to Combat Medicine_ vid again to make himself realize it was for the best. But all he could see in the patients was Arthur's sandy hair, the way Arthur lay when he was asleep, and by the time he was on the tunnel train to West Twelve, he thought his feelings had sunk as low as they could go.

Three days later, the attack came. It wasn't where either of them were expecting.


	2. Chapter 2

CIDOME EAST 22

BREACH TIME: 02:41, 302-12-4

DAMAGE: 80% of residential habitat beyond salvage. Missile fallout renders remaining levels temporarily uninhabitable.

CASUALTIES: [extracted from page 2] … Kirkland, Arthur; Kirtley, Desaan; Kitson, John…

()()()

Alfred had forgotten a very important face, and he couldn't even remember whose it was.

It was, he thought, the worm's fault. He could feel it in his head, moving around very slowly, and eating as it moved. Mainly what it ate was memories. It couldn't actually be eating his brain, because Alfred didn't think he was dying, although sometimes the pain was so bright and clear that he wasn't sure. But it mouthed at everything he thought until the thoughts shriveled, and it left a trail behind it of thoughts that weren't his.

Alfred was sure he hadn't signed up for this, whatever _this _was. He couldn't tell if the worm was real or not. He was having a very hard time telling what was real anyway. The scratchy, medical-feeling sheets under him were real, he thought, and so was the harsh, ragged breathing. That was him.

He was certain the attack was real, as well. He still remembered the blaring of the warning systems and the pressure breach, the hissing of the lights systems and the water leaking into their sealed underground environment. He'd been on the main concourse, doing something important, something he couldn't quite remember. And then the first Elite spider-drone came through the breach.

He desperately tried to remember. He could get flashes of grey tunnels, interface controls, even the tunnel entrance to his old school, but faces eluded him. Even the important one, that he'd forgotten, and that he'd said he'd never forget. He must have had family, he must have had _friends –_

The worm didn't like that, and fat and bloated as it was, it still managed to move with surprising speed to latch onto the dying memory. Alfred pushed it away and another spark of pain went through his body. He turned his head. Fighting it might hurt, but no hero would let it win.

He didn't know how much time passed as he struggled in and out of consciousness with an IV in the crook of his arm. It hurt to open his eyes to the bright white light of the room, and the disinfected air dried out his throat.

He folded everything he could salvage – no full memories, because he had lost all those, but instead all the half-formed struggles and grief at forgetting – into a bright white space somewhere within the pain and shoved it down, away from himself, away from the worm. And when he had done that, he stopped fighting, and lay back exhausted, and let it in.

Some time later, it let him sleep.

()()()

Alfred woke up with a strange dull jumpsuit on and an entire set of new knowledge in his brain.

He was in – _downshift quarters_, was the term that immediately pushed itself forward, looking around the sparse room with eight beds, although he'd had a vague notion he'd called it something else before. He sat up in bed, rubbing his head. He felt weirdly well, considering he'd been on an IV last time he was conscious. There was an odd, nagging need, though, in the pit of his gut. Alfred prodded his stomach, disconcerted. He knew what hunger felt like, and that wasn't it. _Something's wrong_.

"Hey, you're awake!" The door slid aside and a boy with green eyes and a shock of brown hair came in. He was wearing an identical blue jumpsuit to Alfred's – _pilot overalls,_ Alfred thought, the information feeding itself automatically from his brain. "Thought you'd never make it up."

Alfred managed to summon up a grin. _Something's wrong_. "I wake up for food," he said. "And I'm really hoping this isn't gonna be hospital trays, 'cause I need something fried."

The boy laughed, although there was a puzzled undercurrent to it. "You'll get food in mess," he said. He grinned. "Although you look like you could lose a few pounds. Heroes don't get to be flabby."

_Heroes_. Was that why he had signed up for this? The answer was tantalizingly out of his reach. "I'm Jones, by the way," Alfred said. His name seemed to be one of the things that hadn't faded at all. "Alfred Jones."

"Tell your grandmother. Your name's come up in briefings every morning." The boy held out his hand. "I'm Antonio. I run Tracer. Welcome to the Aurea pilots."

Alfred grasped his hand and tried to find the words to ask how he got here, or about the person who was vitally important and who he had stupidly forgotten, but another thought – a _need_ – was pushing itself so insistently in his head that his other thoughts were being drowned out. _Aureus_, he thought, and the thought was so strong it pushed him up from his bed and had him groping for his shoes.

"Gets you, doesn't it," Antonio said, still grinning. "C'mon, I'll show you the way."

"That'd be neat," Alfred said, striving for casualness. _Something's wrong._ The weird feeling had morphed into a screaming compulsion that sat tense at the back of his neck. It was stronger than the worst cravings he'd ever had. It was even stronger than his need to find whoever he was looking for.

They didn't seem to need any ID for moving around this habitat – the door hissed open as they neared, and led out into a passage. The end of it terminated in a series of airlocks with no apparent way to open them from this side. Alfred hesitated, torn in two between checking them – what if whoever he had forgotten was behind them? – and following the new compulsion in his head.

"What are you waiting for?" Antonio said cheerfully, and Alfred turned away from the airlocks. He could check them later. The compulsion led the other way, around the gently curving metal corridor. It felt like a small habitat, the corridor only wide enough for two people to pass. They didn't meet another soul as they picked up speed. Other doors hissed open as they went by, but Alfred was too caught up with the compulsion even to look.

A door slid aside for them, and Alfred strode through it ahead of Antonio and stopped for an instant to get his bearings. He was in a domed white room, big enough to be an insane waste of habitat space. There were steps leading up to a walkway that hugged the dome, with eight hatches leading off it at intervals. Alfred found he had a word in his head for it already. "The – rotum?" he said uncertainly, as they looked up at the high curves of the ceiling.

"That's right," a voice barked from behind them.

Alfred turned, and had to look up. He wasn't used to that. The newcomer was a tall, broad-shouldered boy, maybe a couple of years older than them, dressed in blue with the little gold wing crest like theirs. His blonde hair was cropped close to his head. "You must be the new pilot," he said, his voice deep and no-nonsense. "We got briefed about you." He looked Alfred up and down, his expression not impressed.

Alfred, used to the disapproving gaze of staff sergeants – _how did I get used to sergeants? Why can't I remember? – _straightened his back automatically. "Jones," he said, then hesitated as he tripped over the blank space where he should have said his rank. He'd forgotten that too. There was a bright, white space inside his head which suggested _student_, but that was all mixed up with _medic trainee_ and _transit passenger_ and _intern_.

"Jones, _sir,_" the tall boy snapped.

The gold wings on their shoulders were exactly the same. It took Alfred only a split second to decide he wasn't deferring to anyone the same age and rank as him. He gave the boy look of wide-eyed surprise. "I'm senior already?"

The tall boy turned apoplectically red. Alfred thought he might actually be choking. He raised his voice. "_I am the ranking pilot here_!"

"Ludwig, I'm sure he's just-" Antonio interjected, but Alfred wasn't in the mood for backing down.

"What makes you the ranking pilot?" Alfred said, crossing his arms.

The boy called Ludwig strode across the short distance between them and brought his face close to Alfred's. "Because I can take a bunch of ragtag insubordinates like _you_ and turn this into something approaching a disciplined force." Alfred tried to look as contemptuous as Ludwig was, but he didn't have the same icy glare. Ludwig snorted. "Now get down and give me ten pushups."

"_Ludwig_," Antonio said, and this time he shoved Alfred aside. "Give him a break, he's just woken up from conditioning. He's got new-pilot jitters." He waved his hands in front of him, his whole body language placatory. "He'll be better once he's logged some Aurea time."

"Hmph," Ludwig said, unimpressed. He turned away. "That's the _only_ free infraction you get, Jones. Get him in Eagle."

Alfred glanced around as he followed Antonio further into the room. _Eagle_ meant nothing to him, although the word _Aurea_ had sent a shiver through his whole mind – every part of it, that was, except a peculiar bright white space which seemed oddly detached.

On the other side of the rotum there was an air-interface control stretching like a prickly black bush against one curved wall. A small, gangly-looking boy with a flyaway strand of hair sat before it, absorbed in the complicated dance of his hands as he changed the flickering screens in front of him. There was another boy looking over his shoulder at the screen, his sandy head bent near the first boy's dark one.

"Romano!" Ludwig said. "Eagle and Leviathan. Call up."

"That's not on schedule," the dark-haired boy grumbled. The other, sandy-haired one glanced over his shoulder, and Alfred stopped dead.

"When you get an order from your superior, you don't stop to comment on it," Ludwig growled. Romano said something annoyed and half-whining in return, but Alfred wasn't listening. Everything had closed down around him. He was in a tunnel where everything around him rushed past, blurred, until there was only him and the other boy in the universe.

"A-" he started, and nearly choked.

The boy was giving him a curious look, as if Alfred was a stranger who had come up to him in the street.

_This is what's wrong_. Alfred tried again, nearly swallowed his own tongue, and tried again. His new thoughts didn't want him to say it.

To hell with them. He could forget everything else, but he was not going to forget this.

_"Arthur!"_ he said. As if the word had set his body free, he took three strides across the room and grabbed Arthur's arm.

Arthur jerked back, pulling his arm away. "Excuse me," he said coldly. "I don't believe we've been introduced."

It felt like a needle stabbing his chest. _I deserve _this, Alfred thought, dropping his arm in dismay, although he couldn't for the life of him remember why.

"You don't know him," Antonio said, sounding like he was trying to be helpful. The needle stabbed again. "You only just got here."

"I know him," Alfred said.

"I've never seen you before in my life," Arthur said flatly. Stab, stab, stab.

Romano leaned around Ludwig to look at them. "Great! Three months' wait for a new pilot and we've got a mad one."

"I'm _not_—"

_"Silence!_" Ludwig said. He glowered at Alfred and Arthur indiscriminately. "Jones, you will stop this nonsense at once. Kirkland, you could do with more Aurea time to keep you off the interface. Call up Lancaster."

Romano turned back to his screen and entered a series of commands with tiny movements of his hands. Arthur's saluted, although his eyes flickered to Ludwig in what Alfred recognized as hidden contempt. Alfred _did _know him. He knew every twist of his face and nuance of his expression. He knew the shape of Arthur's emotions better than his own.

"Done," Romano said sourly. "Now are you bastards going to leave me in peace to get on with these battle plans, or do you want to go in without them? Because I'm _fine_ with you all ending up in a smear on the ground."

"He doesn't mean it," Antonio said cheerfully. He had somehow got between Ludwig and Romano. "Stop snapping in front of the new pilot," he said, giving Romano's shoulder a pat. "You're making a bad impression."

"I don't give a shit," Romano said, fiddling with the controls. Above them, three hatches were starting to open. "You'd all do me a favor by getting blown up."

"Then you wouldn't have anyone to complain at," Antonio said. "You're just cranky because you're hungry. Here, I saved you this." He reached in his pocket and dropped a wrapped plastic block – _ration cube, _said the knowledge Alfred' head – on the wrist-rest. "You only had one cube at lunch before you raced off to fiddle with your battle sims."

"Not hungry," Romano said, his eyes glued to the screen. Ludwig turned on his heel, beckoning Alfred and Arthur.

"Eat, or you'll fail workout," Antonio said, ruffling Romano's hair as they left.

"Get _off!_"

The compulsion was coming in alarming waves, ebbing every time Alfred glanced at Arthur, but coming back with a vengeance when he looked at the hatches. He felt a sense of inevitability as he climbed the metal stairs to the walkway, like this was what he had been born for. But Arthur didn't fit with that vision, and Alfred felt almost seasick as he swung between the two.

Alfred stopped by the nearest open hatch, the compulsion drawing him to a halt. He leaned in, hardly even aware of Ludwig's stream of instructions. _Eagle_, Ludwig had said. This was it. This was the Aureus.

It was a tiny enclosed space, with a control seat and grooves to rest his arms and legs and head. There was such a tangle of wires and tubing that he couldn't see what anything did, but the moment he pushed himself in, soft cool pads closed around his legs and torso. And that was right, but not enough – he should be _connected_ to something. He thumped his hand into the metal side and felt like he could have cried.

"It's manual," Ludwig said, his bulk blocking out the rotum light at the hatch. He reached down and picked up a metal pad connected to a tube. "Do your legs first – these are microneedle pads, so this is going to sting. You have to make sure you connect up slow and straight." He eased the metal square down onto the soft pad covering Alfred' right calf, and Alfred felt a sudden ache, followed by a cool tingling. That was _it_. He did the one on his chest himself, Ludwig directing him how to position it. The final one plugged into the back of his neck. A few seconds after it was in, the tingling feeling flooded his body.

When he opened his eyes, he was something else.

He flooded into the bulk of metal around him. Its sensors were connected up with his own body, the pump of its fuel drive like his pulse. The tubes were writhing around him now, settling in much closer so their flow was more efficient, now he didn't need space in the cabin. Eagle lay quiescent in what he could now feel was a docking bay. Alfred reached out with beams that felt like his own fingers and triggered the release mechanisms, the knowledge as easy as breathing, and _launched_.

The air rushed past him in a dizzying blast, and he was flying. He soared through the foggy sky. The fog only thinned out below, where Alfred could see – or _feel_, with Eagle's external sensors – ravaged ground bristling with defenses along a wall stretching out from horizon to horizon. The defenses were thickest around the thin metal circle of the launch tunnel, ten kilometers of sensors and heavy artillery.

There were gusts of wind battering him from the north, but Eagle's slim form and extendable fan-wings had been built to slip through and ride them. He could feel that he could get through the clouds, higher than anything made of metal should be able to.

Two other Aurea shot out of the tunnel below him. Alfred felt them rather than saw them, the pair outlined in his augmented senses like glowing sparks against the night sky. One was big, climbing through the sky slowly and massively, the air folding around it. _Leviathan_. The other – Arthur's Lancaster – was mid-sized and compact, heavier than its size suggested, but Alfred could feel the short-range missiles nested around it as easily as he could feel Eagle's light long-range ones. A close quarters fighter.

As they emerged into the sky, images of Arthur and Ludwig flickered up in front of Alfred. They were projections in the cabin, so Alfred had to spare some of his Aurea-awareness to run his body and weave his annoyingly limited visual input in with his much wider-ranging senses from Eagle.

"Keep close," Arthur said, his voice as clear as if he'd been sitting next to Alfred.

Alfred grinned at his image on the screen, the tiny scowl of concentration between Arthur's eyes that was so adorable. "Not on your life," he said. "Let's let this baby _fly_." He engaged the boosters and shot upwards.

"_Get back down here!_" Ludwig shouted, pulling Leviathan up.

"Communications problem!" Alfred said. "Static on the line! What's that you're saying?" He cheerfully ignored Ludwig's reddening face and rose and rose, hoping for the stunning sight he was sure waited for him above the clouds. Leviathan was easy to outpace, and Alfred left him struggling through the lower atmosphere.

To Alfred's intense disappointment, the fog stretched up with no break. There seemed to be no blue sky left – he couldn't remember where he had got the image of it, but he felt in his bones that sky should be blue. But even Eagle couldn't reach further than this. He dropped back down the last few miles slowly and despondently.

"You _fool_," Ludwig snapped, catching up with him and bringing Leviathan to bear on his tail, shepherding him towards the launch tunnel. "This is a war zone! Get back!"

"Fine," Alfred said grouchily.

"You say, _yes, sir!"_

"Yes, Sir Stick-Up-Your-Ass," Alfred muttered, and on the screen he heard an involuntary snort from Arthur. That gave him heart. Whatever else was happening, however unsettling this got, he could still make Arthur laugh. "Can we land and explore?" he said.

"No!" Ludwig said, and the fury had turned into something near alarm.

"Don't try!" Arthur said, almost at the same time. "Aurea explode on contact with the ground."

"That sounds like—" Alfred tried to say _pretty shitty design_, but the new knowledge in his brain wouldn't let him.

"We can't leave anything for the enemy to study," Arthur said, but he looked uneasy for the first time since they'd launched.

A soft _click_ sounded, and a voice came through speakers Alfred hadn't known were in his cabin.

"Leviathan, return," Romano's voice said sharply. "Lancaster, Eagle, return. Urgent. They're coming."

"Down!" Ludwig barked. Arthur started dropping Lancaster towards the tunnel instantly. "How far are they?"

"Outer perimeter ping." That was Antonio's voice. "You'll get it on your systems in – there." A small piercing whine filled the cabin and Ludwig grimaced and shut it off. "Roderich and Gilbert are on duty. Albatross and Shrike will be out there in T minus two minutes."

"Get the new brat _back_," Romano added.

"Don't get your underpants bunched," Alfred said. "We're coming." He started the descent. As Leviathan slowly dropped behind him, Alfred felt a dark smudge on the horizon, miles and miles out.

"That's them," Ludwig said grimly. "See them?"

When you were in an Aureus, _seeing_ seemed to be synonymous with _feeling_, but it would have been impossible to miss the black shapes creeping on the horizon. They felt slimy and cockroach-tough to Eagle's sensors, and Alfred felt a shiver through his physical body even encased in the protective metal.

"Cree," Ludwig said, disgusted. The word slammed open a door in Alfred' head and new knowledge came pouring out: _insect, revolting, dangerous, hungry, alien, other_. He knew their attack patterns, the gelatinous shine of their ships, and their relentless hunger to cross the line and consume whatever they found on the Elite side. But the Aurea were here to fight them. That was what Alfred was here for. That was what he _existed_ for.

"We can take them!" Alfred said, slowing his descent until he was nearly at a halt. There only felt like two of them.

"I'm not taking you into combat until you've logged more hours," Ludwig said. "Get down."

"But –" Alfred said. Before he could finish, a sudden wall of noise came from his speakers, screeches and groans and insect-like chittering. It sent a violent shudder through him. It sounded like wings on carapaces, skittering legs, biting mouths. His skin was crawled so badly he wanted to scratch grooves in it to get rid of the imaginary bugs.

He saw Ludwig's image swear and flick a switch, and the chittering stopped. "Damn bugs," he said. "They like to scare us. We block their transmission, but every now and then they find a way around it."

They were coming a lot faster than Alfred had realized. He sped his descent again, but Leviathan was still moving slowly above him, trying to turn. With a nasty shock, he felt three more Cree ships enter his senses, screaming down from the upper atmosphere faster than should be possible. They were right on Leviathan's tail.

_Hero,_ he thought, and a burst of adrenaline lit up his body and sent him diving upwards, bringing Eagle's long-range missiles to bear. One shot – two – three – a pair of the needle-like Cree ships fell out of the sky, and Leviathan swung round and obliterated the third with a barrage of firepower that could have taken out a small cidome.

Alfred had taken his attention off the screens for the brief moments the dogfight took. When he reached out again, looking for Arthur, a thrill of horror went through him. Arthur was right by the launch tunnel, and a Cree had crept up under the radar and was arrowing straight for Lancaster's unprotected tailwing.

"_Arthur!" _Alfred shouted, but it was too late, the Cree had already started to shoot. But, unbelievably, Arthur was already moving as well, whipping Lancaster around in an impossibly fast spiral. The missile nearly grazed Lancaster's wing. Arthur turned, his face locked in a tight scowl, and fired a single short-range destroyer. The Cree exploded in a white blast.

"Nice shot!" Alfred shouted, letting Eagle drop in a wash of enthusiastic relief. "Show the bastards!"

Arthur looked as cool as usual. Ludwig finally made it to tunnel level, his expression strained somewhere between anxiousness and towering anger. "Stay closer in formation, Kirkland," he said gruffly.

"Yes, sir," Arthur said, his expression cool and giving nothing away.

"That was great flying," Alfred said admiringly, as he circled down. "You must have eyes in the back of your head."

"I watch my own back," Arthur said. There was something colorless about his voice that touched a painful nerve ending inside Alfred's white memories.

"Arthur—" Alfred said, uncertain of what to say. He felt like he and Arthur were standing on cliff edges and the gulf between them was only getting wider.

"I learned a while ago that nobody would come and save me," Arthur said flatly. "Nobody ever does."

He cut his projection from the screen. Alfred stared at the blank space, his relief turning cold.


	3. Chapter 3

Taking out the microneedle pads hurt, but Alfred thought he probably deserved that. Two more Aurea had launched while they had been docking, their pilots' projections appearing momentarily before Alfred pulled out the pads. One boy was intent, brown hair and corrective lenses, eyes half-lidded in concentration, and Alfred could feel that was the one piloting the massive Albatross glider. The other boy was white-haired and his projection gave them a feral smile as the small, lethal Shrike shot past. They arrowed towards the slower Cree on the southern horizon.

Alfred pulled himself back into his suddenly inadequate human body. His human eyes were weak and boring by comparison with his Aurea senses, but he could use them to watch Arthur walk stiffly along the floor below. Alfred leaned on the railing and checked over every inch of Arthur's body for injuries. Nothing. It still didn't excuse Alfred for not saving him.

"Move, Jones," Ludwig said, striding along from Leviathan's hatch. "Evening rations. Let's go, we have a schedule."

"Supper," Alfred said blankly, his eyes still on Arthur's disappearing back – _he could have died – _and Ludwig gave him an odd look.

"Let's use normal words, shall we?" Ludwig said after a moment. Alfred realized that _supper_ had come from the bright white space in his head and shook his head to clear the weird feeling. He shouldn't be listening to that.

Arthur seemed intentionally trying to keep out of his way. At evening rations, he came in late, checked where Alfred was sitting next to Ludwig, and carefully placed himself at the other end of the table. The room was noisy with Antonio and Romano picking up a long running argument over whether kissing in the rotum was inappropriate, a topic which made Alfred give them a startled sideways look. The last pilot, Feliciano, turned out to be a bubbly twin of Romano. He was apparently disappointed Alfred wasn't female, "because we haven't had a beautiful lady pilot for years," he told Alfred earnestly. Ludwig seemed to stiffen in annoyance beside him.

_You have Arthur_, Alfred wanted to say, but Arthur was too far away to hear it and be irritated, so there was no point. "Maybe you'll get one next time," he said. He crumbled the pale ration cute between his fingers. He supposed he had to eat it because they were the only food his new knowledge told him existed. But he had the faint, wistful feeling that food wasn't supposed to be one taste and one crumbly texture.

Feliciano looked at him with amiable bafflement. "But there are only eight Aurea," he said.

"How do you get new pilots, then?" Alfred said.

"Someone has to die," Ludwig said.

"That's ridiculous," Alfred said indignantly. "Can't they just make more?"

Ludwig's face was like stone. "They don't."

Alfred felt a nasty twist in his stomach. It was heroic to fight anything that looked like the Cree, but he'd thought his Aurea had been new. "Who was the last pilot in mine?"

Feliciano's face had fallen at the turn the conversation had taken. "Leave him alone," Ludwig said abruptly, laying a heavy hand on Feliciano's arm.

"You sound like you don't even _care_," Alfred said.

Feliciano made a small, miserable noise. "My stomach hurts."

"Change. The. Subject." Ludwig said, spacing each word as if it would explode if he put it too close to the others.

Alfred realized he was mentally holding his breath, waiting for Arthur to jump into the conversation and tell him off for being a tactless git. But when he looked up, Arthur was at the other end of the table, his head bent in a quiet discussion with Antonio and ostentatiously paying no attention to Alfred's conversation. Alfred suddenly felt terribly, terribly lonely.

_You failed him already today_, he told himself. His stomach was twisting and he knew that was his fault. Arthur didn't owe him acknowledgement, whatever he remembered or not. "So," he said brightly, trying to turn the mood up again. "You and Romano. Twins?"

Feliciano had curled up with one hand over his stomach, but at that he looked up with that blank expression on his face that all of them seemed to get when Alfred used words he shouldn't know. "Huh?" he said, although it came out more like a quizzical sigh. _Huuuuh?_

Alfred could feel the same confusion on his own face. It was like they were talking a different language. He had to fight through the white space in his head even to get the word _siblings, twins, family_. "Brothers?" he tried.

"No?" Feliciano said. He looked at Ludwig as if for confirmation.

But at that moment the door slid aside and in came the two boys who Alfred had last seen flitting past on the Aurea screens.

The white-haired boy was a coil of aggression and sharp angles, while the other boy with the long brown hair walked in as if this was an – the words _upper class restaurant_ flashed across Alfred's brain, but he couldn't remember how to pin them to an image. The elegance contrasted sharply with the ugly round wound on his forehead, like a newly burst blister. Blood was leaking from it in a near-black ooze.

Now that Alfred looked through his new knowledge, he did _know_ that you risked getting hurt in battle – when the Aurea were damaged, their fluid-based processing systems were badly thrown off, and the microneedle pads fed in fluid that made the pilot's physical body part of that. Blood blisters on the skin were the most common side-effect, but deep in his new memories floated worse words like _organ rupture, internal bleeding, cardiac failure. _He was so distracted by this new and unwelcome development that he jumped when the white-haired boy slammed his hand down on the table in front of him.

"You're in my seat."

Alfred wasn't a brawler or a bully, but he didn't take well to being bullied himself. His back stiffened and he looked up. "Sorry," he said. "I didn't see your name on it."

"Funny," the boy said, red eyes and sharp teeth glinting at him. "Because I wrote it right here. See?" He traced a word on the table in front of Alfred. Neither of them looked at his moving finger.

"Excuse him," said the bored voice of the new boy at the other end of the table. "He gets wound up after fights. Do sit down, Gilbert."

"Shut it, Roderich," Gilbert said, without turning his head. His red eyes on Alfred were mocking. "Do I need to pull you out of it, new boy?"

Alfred slowly got to his feet, not breaking the gaze. He took a step away from the hard plastic edge of the table. "I don't _want_ to fight you," he said. "But if you really want a beating, I give as good as I get. Better." There was a fierce energy surging in his body. He knew he shouldn't give into this gnawing desire, but everything had been confusing and Arthur had rejected him and Alfred had nearly got him killed, and all the swirling white in Alfred's head felt like it might coalesce if he could just _punch _something. The other boy looked like he felt the same way.

"Yeah?" Gilbert said, raising his fists. He was grinning. Alfred looked at his stance and his eyes and raised his calculation of his skills by several notches. He flung his own hands up just as Gilbert threw the first punch.

It escalated fast. Feliciano yelped and tried to duck out of the way. Antonio and Romano shouted from down the table. Ludwig roared and tried to grab Gilbert's shoulder, but Alfred and Gilbert were going at it hammer and tongs now, a real bare-knuckle boxing match, and he couldn't get a grip. Gilbert was grinning like a maniac. Alfred got a couple of nice hits in with satisfying _thuds_, taking another couple himself, and they were going for each other again when more hands reached in and broke them up.

Roderich had grabbed one of Gilbert's arms and was hanging on grimly, and Ludwig had seized the other wrist in a grip that looked like it was on the verge of breaking a bone. And there was a cool hand on Alfred's shoulder, not applying any pressure, but something in the familiarity of the touch made Alfred falter and stop.

"No," Arthur said, and a balloon seemed to burst pleasantly in Alfred's stomach, flooding it with warmth.

He flashed Arthur a grin over his shoulder. "Anything you say, babe." _Don't take that hand away._

Tragically Arthur hadn't developed into a mind reader, and pulled his hand away. "Trust you to spoil my food."

Alfred caught his hand as he pulled it back. "Do you?" he said, low and urgent. "Trust me? Do you remember?"

Arthur gave him a strange, edgy look and yanked his arm away. He turned his head away and went back to his seat.

"Gilbert," Roderich was saying, his voice like cut glass. "Do you happen to recall that you are flying my tracker contact maneuver, and that I need you undamaged for practice? Or did that not register?"

Feliciano was tugging Alfred back down again. Alfred managed to tear his eyes away from Arthur long enough to sit down. "You can't beat up Gilbert," Feliciano whispered. "He's flying an important mission soon."

"Huh? _Him?_" Alfred said, flicking a glance at Gilbert. He'd bet on him in a wrestling match, but not for any kind of sensitive mission. "What's he doing?"

"High Command sent us down a new tracker they want us to plant on a Cree to detect how many ships they have behind their defense lines," Feliciano said. "And what type they are, that sort of thing." He waved a hand vaguely. "I forgot the details."

"Tracker, huh?" Arthur said thoughtfully. He leaned down the table, pitching his voice over the chatter. "Hey, Gilbert," he said. "It's okay, I can fly in your place if I lay you out. Don't sweat it." He grinned.

Gilbert made to throw a ration cube at him, but he was smiling as well, a deadly sharp-toothed grin. Alfred remembered him ripping past him in his Aurea earlier that day, and suddenly felt uneasy. _Was_ he better than Gilbert? He'd have to practice and find out. One thing was certain: he needed to be good enough never to leave Arthur in danger again.

The rest of the evening was divided into study – advanced mathematics and battle tactics – and a military hygiene routine prompted by the same mechanical voice in Alfred' head that had provided all his new vocabulary. _21.00 hours – shower. 21.10 hours – lay out clothes for next shift. _ _21.15 hours – dental hygiene. _At exactly 21.17 hours he was sitting on the edge of his bed while Arthur brushed his teeth. On the other side of the room, Feliciano appeared to have gone to sleep on Ludwig's shoulder, sitting on the bed beside him, one hand over his stomach. Ludwig was scowling, as if this was the one nagging question he didn't have an answer to. The others seemed to have different sleep shifts.

There was one thing nagging Alfred above everything else. "I feel like… I lost some time," he said. "What's the date?"

Arthur always looked at screens more than Alfred did. "Twelfth of the fifth month," he said, without looking at Alfred.

Alfred started. He didn't remember what date it had been when he had woken up in here, but he had a sudden strong feeling that they'd lost more time than he thought. _Lost from what? _a mocking voice said. _The life you made up in your head? There's nothing but this. You were made for this._

No. The eighteenth was some sort of … anniversary? But whose – someone he knew? A friend? He had the feeling it was very important. "Arthur," he said, after a moment's thought. "I think it's your birthday coming up."

Arthur stopped, his washcloth in his hand. "Birthday?" he said blankly.

"Don't you remember?" Alfred said. He could feel his own birthday – months away – tucked in the bright white thoughts.

There was a moment when Alfred could almost feel Arthur's straining thoughts himself, but an instant later Arthur's expression changed to forced neutrality. Alfred could recognise when he was covering up stomach-aching disappointment. "I don't know what this 'birthday' thing is," Arthur said. "Stop making up words." He turned the tap on to full blast.

()()()

The next morning, Alfred was the last one up. It felt familiar, as if he was usually the last one up in any situation. _Briefing at 06.00_, said the voice in his head, and it was nearly that now. He hummed a fast, frantic tune as he stripped off and pulled on his pilot overalls. He had dressing fast down to an art.

He ran out into the passage and nearly collided with someone else coming the other way. Arthur.

Arthur had stopped and was staring at him, with that peculiarly intense green-eyed stare that made something odd happen in Alfred's chest. After a moment, when the stare didn't move, Alfred realized he was staring straight back, probably looking like an idiot. This was stupid. He tried a grin.

"Oh for fuck's sake," Arthur said, which was admittedly not the reaction Alfred had been gunning for. Arthur stepped forward and reached for Alfred's neck.

"What are you-" Alfred said, but trailed off when Arthur started adjusting the neckline of his pilot overalls where it had folded over on itself. Not that Alfred objected, but it was kind of hard not to respond to Arthur's fingers brushing lightly against his skin.

"You're a mess," Arthur snapped. He straightened out the fabric that had bunched around Alfred's waist. "Do you _know_ what will happen if you go into briefing like that?"

"No?" Alfred said. He tried to help but Arthur knocked his hands away, and he pulled away with his fingers spread, unable to keep a small smile from tugging at his lips. Now Arthur was tugging out the creases in his trouser legs and picking lint from his knees. He'd forgotten Arthur's obsession with neat clothes. Although this level of it was something new; there was a tension in the line of Arthur's back that said it was about something more than fashion. But Arthur's head was level with Alfred's hips now and Alfred's thoughts were veering off in unhelpful but distractingly attractive directions.

"Collected for discipline," Arthur said, "and I _won't_ let that happen to you."

"You won't?" Alfred was finding this conversation more and more baffling, but any signs Arthur still cared about him were welcome. "Why? What happens?" At Arthur's peremptory gesture he gave him his sleeve cuffs for attention.

"Do you ever stop asking questions?" Arthur said, and then, as if the answer was obvious, "No, I know you don't. Idiot."

His fingers encircled Alfred's right wrist as he said it. An irresistible compulsion lanced through Alfred, and twisted his hand around and grabbed Arthur's wrist instead. He held it lightly, looking intently into Arthur's eyes, enjoying the feeling of the fine bones under his fingers. If there had been irritation or fear in Arthur's face Alfred would have dropped the hold, but there wasn't. There was only the faint, pleased surprise that was so familiar it hurt. Arthur had looked like that the first time Alfred had bought him a birthday present. He'd looked like that the first time Alfred had awkwardly asked him round to hang out. He'd looked like that the first time Alfred had rested his head on his shoulder – _no._

"Jones-" Arthur said uncertainly. His other hand was raised, the fingers slightly spread. He made an abortive movement, as if he couldn't decide whether to touch Alfred's face or not. "Jones, I-"

"Kirkland! Jones!" a voice barked from behind them. Arthur jumped, stiffening all over, and turned around.

It was Ludwig, immaculate in perfect uniform and combed hair. "Get into briefing! It won't wait for you!"

Alfred barely suppressed a desire to punch him. "Sir," he drawled.

Arthur sketched a quick salute. "Sir," he snapped, and grabbed Alfred's arm. "Come on!" he hissed. "You can't be late!"

"Why, what's going to happen?" Alfred said, but he got no answer. Arthur pulled him into the rotum, where the others were all lined up. Even Antonio had got the creases out of his uniform, and Romano was standing to attention by his side. Feliciano was practically quivering with nerves, facing a screen projection that covered half the wall.

Then Alfred saw the screen, and his eyes narrowed in confusion.


	4. Chapter 4

_That's an android_.

The thought was as clear and cold as a shot of liquid nitrogen as it rose forbidden from Alfred's brain. The officer on the screen was a near-perfect human, crisp and smart in a black lieutenant's uniform, but there were little tells. His eyes were slightly too slow as they flicked from side to side. His lips were slightly the wrong shape as he spoke. He rattled off the formalities and the day's orders: training, study, short patrols, but no major excursions today unless the Cree alarms sounded. The orders might have been written by a human. They might have been put together by a computer. Alfred couldn't tell.

Ludwig barked commands and the pilots numbered off and saluted, from Antonio at the front of the two columns to Arthur at the back. Alfred did it out of pure reflex, eyes front. The officer on the screen saluted back.

_We just saluted an android_, Alfred thought. The shock had taken him into the hidden part of his brain, where his thoughts were whirling around like the tail of a jet stream. Androids weren't used in the military back home. Nobody would take orders from a robot. Why were _they_ taking orders from a robot?

Wait. Back _home?_

"Jones," Ludwig snapped. "_Jones!"_

Alfred jumped to attention, feeling dizzy and sick from the thoughts. "Yes?"

"Aureus status report!"

Alfred opened his mouth. He had the words lining up in his brain, _Ludwig, that's an android, and also I just remembered that I don't come from here, and I don't think I should be here. _He tried to shape his tongue around them, got as far as "Ludwig,"and then—

—and then his head went sharp, blinding grey, like countless metal slivers digging their way into his brain. Nausea lurched in his stomach and swept through his body. In the blinding silver he couldn't tell which way was up. His knees hit the floor, and then his head. The room had gone mad around him. He tried to throw up but he couldn't move any of his muscles. Anything he'd been going to say was completely gone.

He came to, dry-retching, with a hand on his shoulder. Arthur's hand.

"Did the officer see?" Arthur was saying, in a low, urgent voice.

"He let us off," Ludwig said, and there was tension lacing through his voice like wire. "He signed off without looking at either of you. You're a fool, Kirkland. You shouldn't have broken ranks!"

"He collapsed," Arthur snapped.

"He clearly triggered his mind wipe himself," Ludwig said, without an inch of compromise in his tone. "He'll come round. You'll do an extra workout after supper as discipline."

"Oh, go to hell," Arthur said, trying to haul Alfred to his feet. Alfred was gathering his senses by now, and managed to get his legs to work and help. There was no way a squirt like Arthur was going to be able to lift him however much working out Arthur had been doing. It was uncomfortably surprising how strong Arthur's arms were.

The rotum was empty apart from the three of them. Alfred swallowed against the ebbing nausea. He had to grope to find any words at all, since it felt like a scourer had gone through his brain and washed them all out. "Wasn't Arthur's fault," he said. Arthur's hand was still on his shoulder.

Ludwig's short-cut hair usually lay back in military ranks, but now it seemed like every individual hair was bristling a fraction away from his head in sheer repressed fury. He drew a breath, and Alfred jumped in to forestall the rant. "Look, I just got dizzy and collapsed. It's probably nothing. I'll get a check up. We didn't get in trouble. We—"

"The lieutenant didn't see," Arthur said, reluctantly taking his hand away.

Alfred broke off. He had a nagging feeling there was something very wrong with what Arthur had just said, but he couldn't remember what. And that was familiar as well, the feeling of something lost. He could have punched something in frustration. Words floated up from nowhere, gone as soon as his thoughts touched them. _This is the second time._

"Both of you are assigned extra workout!" Ludwig said. He didn't wait for Alfred to argue any more, but turned on his heel and walked away.

"Yes, Sir Meat-For-Brains," Alfred muttered. He rubbed his head as Ludwig left, sore from where it had hit the ground. It still felt empty. "Arthur, let's blow that off. He's not gonna register it anywhere, right? Who's gonna care?"

"Too much for you?" Arthur said with fake solicitousness. "Shall I fetch the tea and cupcakes and you can rest on the sofa?"

That was what he used to say. Alfred felt a spark of delight that really shouldn't be caused by snippy comments, but this was Arthur, and snippy comments were how he connected to people. He grinned and slapped one of his biceps to show it off. "I'm up for a challenge."

Arthur gave him a darkly amused, unimpressed look. "Maybe if Ludwig stays still long enough you can lift him."

"But seriously," Alfred said, "Ludwig's not even one grade higher than us. Why the hell does everyone act like he's in charge? Where are our _superior officers?_"

Arthur's amusement deserted him. "You stupid prat," he said, staring at Alfred. "Five minutes – _five minutes – _after you've triggered your mind wipe, and you're already asking _that_?"

"Triggered my mind wipe," Alfred repeated. "You know about it? Why didn't you–"

"No," Arthur said, cutting him off. "I'm not having this conversation. I don't have _any_ desire to trigger mine again."

"Oh, come on," Alfred said urgently. "You can't just leave it like that. Tell me."

"No," Arthur said. It wasn't even irritated. It was just a flat, dead refusal, like a screen winking out into blackness. He stepped away before Alfred could even grab his arm, and backed towards the door. "Get to vid training."

()()()

It wasn't until everyone else was in the vid room that Alfred realized that Arthur was supposed to be there, and also that he wasn't going to turn up.

"Where _is_ he?" Ludwig growled at Alfred, who had apparently become point man for Arthur's whereabouts sometime in the last two days.

"Dunno," Alfred said uneasily. "I saw him leave the rotum. Maybe he's gone to take a nap?"

That didn't sound likely even to him. Ludwig stared at him incredulously and Alfred shrugged.

Beside him, Feliciano yawned and curled up in his padded seat. "A nap sounds good," he said. He tugged at Ludwig's wrist. "You know Arthur hates these vids. Sit down and let's watch it."

"I'm going to dig him out of his hole and drag him here by his collar," Ludwig said, starting purposefully towards the door.

"Hey, what?" Alfred said, feeling defensive on Arthur's behalf. He stood in front of the door, squaring up. "It's his business if he doesn't want to see whatever vid you-"

"Get out of my _way_, Jones!" Ludwig went to push him aside, but as he did, the door behind Alfred hissed shut.

Ludwig bit off a curse and clenched his fist. "Well," he said grimly. "That's that. Take your seat, Jones. And pay attention. There'll be a test after on the xenobiology."

The study was a dissection video.

Alfred felt nauseous at the first sign of the Cree carapace, twitching gently like a giant cockroach. It was shiny black and looked so alien it was barely real. Alfred wanted to believe it was plastic, but he knew better. Its arms and legs and lethal mandibles were so _wrong_. The same part of him that worshipped the Aurea – stronger after the mind wipe – was flooded with disgust. The scientist on the vid made the first incision from the thing's pointed head, just under its lethal mandibles, to the bottom of the abdomen. It bubbled as he opened it. Alfred looked away, queasy.

"You don't want to fail the test," Feliciano whispered, next to him. "You _really _don't."

Alfred stared at the screen and tried to listen as the scientist clinically went through the xenobiological points of interest. It was paradoxically better when he had the dark alien organs out on the white table and was discussing them individually, like a medical training dissection. But the shiver of fear Alfred felt when the scientist pried off the mandibles nearly set him off again.

_They can be killed,_ the scientist assured them solemnly.

Alfred stared at the shining plastic carapace of the mutilated body, and the feeling of wrongness was so strong it was almost vibrating under his skin. His white memories were fading, shrinking away from the creature stretched out on the vid like a bug smeared on a microscope slide.

He wished Arthur was there. As the vid ended and the light strips brightened, Alfred found he was shaking.

It was disgust, his brain reassured him. It had to be disgust. His hands itched for his Aurea. He would have welcomed the attack alarms. He wanted to shoot those damn bugs out of the sky.

"Anyone want to run a patrol?" he said.

"Test," Antonio said, cheerful but inexorable, and gave him a shove towards the study terminals. Up ahead, Ludwig had already found Arthur. They were having a low-voiced argument, Ludwig gripping Arthur's arm and giving it a furious shake whenever he wanted to punctuate a point.

"—won't watch them taking apart a living creature," Arthur was saying, low and fast and disgusted. "It's still alive, it's still _moving_, I don't care _how_ many of our ships they've—"

"Are you _mad_, Kirkland?_"_ Ludwig was making an effort to control his furious voice, but they could still hear it. "Do you want them to take you away again? Do you _like_ failing tests?"

Arthur lifted his eyes wordlessly to the rest of them, over Ludwig's shoulder. Ludwig realised they had an audience and shoved Arthur away. "Take the test, for what good it'll do."

"Statistically, I have a five percent chance of passing," Arthur said, and pushed ahead of them before Ludwig could explode.

()()()

The test on the vid wasn't hard, although Alfred tried to take his audiovisual helmet off when he finished early and was disturbed to find it had locked on. He took a deep breath and ran human anatomy revision, which calmed him down and helped him ignore of the niggling feeling of wrongness at the dismembered Cree.

He just needed to shoot more of them. That would make peace with the feeling.

When the end of test timer finally beeped he ripped his study helmet off. "Am I up for the next patrol?" he said.

Of the others, only Roderich looked perfectly composed coming out from under the helmets, and had somehow managed it without a hair out of place. He rose and punched up the patrol roster on the room's public screen, something Alfred hadn't figured out the trick of yet. "Shrike and Lancaster," he said. "Gilbert and Kirkland; you're out of lu—"

The screen flashed blank. ASSESMENT FAILURE - A. KIRKLAND TO CONNECTING BAY scrolled across it in large black letters.

"Or not," Roderich said, sounding disinterested. "Gilbert, let Jones sub in, will you?"

Alfred didn't hear what Gilbert said in reply, because he was watching Arthur and frowning. Arthur didn't seem surprised at the news, but as he got up, a flicker of something Alfred almost recognised went through his eyes.

Alfred pushed aside Ludwig, who was trying to give him some order or other about patrols, and followed Arthur into the corridor. Arthur had already rounded the corner, walking swiftly to the airlocks that Alfred had reluctantly disregarded when he'd first woken up.

The airlocks were open. Arthur came to attention in front of them, tense and watchful.

"Arthur!" Alfred said. He had to jog the last bit to catch up. "What the hell's happening? Where are you going?"

"To get a commendation for my brilliant test results," Arthur snapped. "What do you think? Go away, Jones."

The uneasy feeling in Alfred's head crystallised. That had been _fear_ in Arthur's eyes. "This is what you were afraid of for me," he said slowly. "When you said you weren't going to let them take me for discipline."

"Because that would have been stupid," Arthur said. His eyes kept flicking from Alfred to the grey corridor beyond the airlocks, as if he was waiting for something to jump out. Neither of them stepped across the threshold. "Getting disciplined over a bloody _uniform_ violation. That would be just like you."

There was a movement around the curve of the corridor. Both of them jumped. Arthur swallowed and stepped forward.

Another android. This one had a tranq-gun at its hip and a real blaster hanging over its back. It strode like a human, but Alfred could tell from the eyes. "Arthur Kirkland," it said flatly, holding up its wrist bracelet, which was flashing an authorisation code.

"Present," Arthur said neutrally. He was almost vibrating with nerves, but he didn't flinch when the android laid a hand on his arm.

"I'll go instead," Alfred said, feeling the unease build to a rising urgency. "Arthur, step back. Get _away_ from it."

Arthur shot him an incredulous look over his shoulder. The android was starting to pull him away. "Shut up, Jones," he said. "Sorry, sir, he's new—"

He was talking to the _android. _Talking to it while it dragged him off to something that made him flinch like there were live wires near his skin. The anger surged up in Alfred and he moved, lunging towards the android. "_Get back, Arthur!_"

Everything was a blur of speed. Alfred felt Arthur's overalls bunch beneath his hand as he jerked him back, felt his knuckles brush the android's head, felt the unnaturally strong grip on his shoulder. The android moved faster than should be possible. There was the _snick_ of a tranq-gun and a sharp, spreading pain in Alfred's hip.

Alfred fell back, his legs suddenly unresponsive lumps of flesh. His vision was swimming. The android gave him a dead, contemptuous look with its almost-human eyes. As Alfred's world hazed out, it took hold of Arthur's arm.


	5. Chapter 5

Alfred was pacing a rut into the plastic floors of the corridors as the time ticked by. He roamed the entire small dome, passing and re-passing the rotum, the gym, the dormitory. _Where is he?_ He didn't have Arthur's laser-sharp imagination, but most of the vague pictures that passed through his head made him want to shoot things.

His hip still ached from the tranq dart. He'd lost an hour from that, and it had been another hour since he'd woken up, swore at Antonio and then accepted the glass of water he offered, and started obsessively checking the airlock. He'd nearly punched Ludwig when Ludwig told him to log sim time and stop pacing. Arthur still wasn't back.

And when the door finally opened, and Arthur stumbled through, shoved by the android, it was worse.

The back of his overalls was stained dark. His eyes were blurred with pain and when the android released his arms, he nearly fell. Alfred had gone from turning the corner into a sprint in a time that wouldn't have disgraced a shock troop trainer. He got to Arthur just as Arthur stumbled, and caught him.

"_Arthur_," Alfred said, his throat nearly closing on the name.

"Waited – for me?" Arthur rasped, the words interrupted in the middle by a sharp breath. It was costing him to speak. "Stupid – git – Jones."

"Don't try and talk," Alfred said, some kind of remembered training spiraling into his mind out of the horror. "Let's get you somewhere – your bed."

He helped Arthur to downshift quarters, where Arthur collapsed on top of the covers. Every now and again a spasm of pain ran through him, and his fingers clutched the sheet like claws.

The overalls zipped up down the side, so Alfred didn't have to find anything to cut the cloth. "I'm going to take a look at your back," he said quietly. "That okay?" He kept his voice calm and reassuring out of habit. It felt weirdly like a voice he'd used with other injured people, somewhere in his lost memories.

Arthur gave a jerky nod into the pillow. Alfred pulled the cloth away sharply so as not to drag the ordeal out. It came away with more resistance than he'd hoped for; the blood on Arthur's shoulders and back was already starting to congeal. Alfred stared at it in dismay.

There was a crisscross of deep cuts over Arthur's back, seeping blood. The ones on his shoulders were turning brown, already clotting; the ones further down were still bright red. They covered from his waist to the base of his neck. The worst thing about them was the way they were all perfectly symmetrical, about an inch apart and crossing at rigidly fixed intervals. There was no human wobble in any of them. They could have been done by a machine.

He felt the anger rise from the soles of his feet. It was crackling like a severed power cable, burning into his whole body. Words rose to his mouth. _Tell me who I can hunt down, Arthur, tell me who I can get back at for this. _

His white thoughts seemed to be back, thin as a thread. He was training to be a goddamn professional. You had to be reassuring with patients. "It's gonna be okay," he said, running supplies through his head. He could get water and sterilized cloth from the washer. Would the dispenser have any med supplies? So far he'd only seen it produce ration cubes. "What were these done with? Was it sterilized?"

Arthur snorted into the pillow. It was a moment before Alfred realized it was amusement. "When- when did _you_ get so competent?" Arthur's voice was rough and sounded like even talking was painful. "It was- I can't-" He took a quick, sharp breath.

Alfred found himself wrapping his fingers around Arthur's hand and holding it tight. Arthur turned his head towards him, his cheek pressed on the pillow. The shock had turned his skin almost grey. Alfred thought he was going to get snapped at, but instead Arthur silently tightened his thin fingers around his.

"You don't have to talk," Alfred said.

Arthur had pressed his teeth together so hard he was finding it hard to talk. "I'm trying to forget the details." He had to stop and breathe, every inhalation shallow and quick. "Blades were sterile, though."

"_Damn _it," Alfred said, losing whatever restraint he had on his anger. His hand pressed Arthur's more tightly. "I'm going to see what I can make the dispenser give me for med supplies. Don't move around while I'm gone, you'll strain the muscles."

"Don't bother," Arthur said. "It won't give you anything."

"Not even painkillers?" Alfred said. "Come on, every dispenser has basic meds! What does Feliciano take for his stomach?" He was pretty sure from talking to Feliciano that the stomach pains he kept complaining about were from stress, but that didn't mean the pain was imaginary. At home Alfred would be telling him to get checked for a stomach ulcer—

_At home. At home. _This time, Alfred kept his mouth shut on the words.

"Nothing," Arthur said. His face was still pale. "You need a full medbay check from the robots if you want meds dispensed. If they decide you're faking, you get – this. We're supposed to be tough. Feliciano won't get checked."

"We're supposed to be pilots," Alfred said, feeling sick. "You can't run patrols like this. They _can't_ deny you medical care. It's a human right!"

"Two hours," Arthur said flatly. "Two hours on the dot from when they let me back in, and the dispenser will give you regen-gel. It accelerates healing by a factor of twelve to fourteen. I'll be healed by this evening."

"Why the delay?" Alfred demanded.

"Because it's a punishment, you idiot!" Arthur said. "I won't watch them rip apart living creatures, so they do this every time- _ugh_." He shut his eyes and his forehead furrowed as some stab of pain went through him.

Alfred suspected it was saying "living creatures" out loud that had done it. _What's in our heads?_ he thought, in the safety of his white memories. _What are they hiding?_

"I'll get you pain meds," Alfred promised. Without thinking, he brushed his thumb over Alfred's forehead to push a strand of hair out of the way. "I'll make it dispense something. I'll take it _apart_ if I have to."

"_Don't get in trouble_," Arthur said, and the sharp tone was laced with fear. "Not for me."

"I'll get in as much trouble for you as I want."

"You don't understand how things work around here, Jones!" Arthur said. "You can't fight anything when there's no one there! Save it for the Cree," he added, and there was a note of bitterness in his tone that made Alfred's stomach clench.

"You're important," he said. He hadn't intended to stop there, but his brain was fighting against forming the words. Damn it, he was in charge of his own speech! "You're more important that the Cree. You're more important than anything in this stupid complex, even – even my Aurea. Even me. Even my lunch," he added, from some long-ago reflex that he could have sworn was a joke they'd once shared.

Arthur was staring at him, his eyes wide. The room was silent.

"You don't mean that," Arthur said after a moment. He sounded sure – Arthur always sounded sure – but Alfred knew how to read him. He could hear the shades under Arthur's tone: hesitancy, bitterness, hunger. "Everyone's out for themselves. You have other things to do right now, don't you? I don't need sympathy. You can go."

"The only place I'm going is to get your meds," Alfred said.

Arthur's mouth curved. "Good excuse. They won't come for two hours."

"_Hey_," Alfred said, and Arthur looked up at the crack in his voice. Alfred couldn't help his voice. That had _hurt_.

He sat on the bed, took Arthur's hand and held it in his lap. He wanted to go and smash up some robots. He wanted to go and hammer the dispenser into giving up a hospital's worth of medical supplies. But some nagging voice was telling him that was what he had done last time: ignored Arthur to do what was best for him. He had a horrible feeling that – hadn't gone so well.

He took a deep breath. "What do you want me to do?" he said.

"Stay," Arthur said swiftly, as if the word had been hovering beneath the surface this whole time. He didn't meet Alfred's eyes. "Please."

Alfred squeezed his hand. "I'll stay," he said. "You should talk, if you can. It might keep your mind off the pain." He wanted to ask _why the hell didn't you watch the vid_, but Arthur was in enough pain as it was. He didn't need hard questions. Factual, easy-recall information. "Tell me about that tracker plan Roderich has."

Arthur looked up at him, eyes blurred with pain, but at the question they seemed to clear a little. He frowned and started talking in a low, exhausted voice about vectors, acceleration speeds, Cree formations. Every now and then he emphasized a point by biting off a word, as if he could keep the pain away with the thin barrier of his voice. Alfred encouraged him, asked questions, pushed the sweat-soaked hair away from Arthur's forehead when it threatened to fall into his eyes.

Eventually Arthur broke off, pressed his head into the pillow, and said, "No, I t-take it back. Go and see if you can hurry up the gel pack."

"Right!" Alfred said, jumping to his feet.

He pried the side panel off the dispenser in the meals room and used a spanner and every programming trick he could possibly think of to make it materialize what he wanted. All he managed were off-schedule ration cubes and a can of gear oil. In the depths of his frustration he dealt it a whack with the spanner, and it beeped and dispensed a pack of medical gel.

"_Finally_," Alfred said, grabbing it. He looked up at the clock and swore. Two hours on the dot from when Arthur had stumbled back in.

The gel worked. Alfred was nervous, smoothing it across Arthur's back, but he kept his hands steady and Arthur held himself braced and bit down on his noises of pain. The change was immediate. The wounds that had started to scab over were already puckering around the edges by the time Alfred had finished.

Arthur gave a shaky sigh and relaxed for the first time since Alfred had seen him that morning. "Water," he said, with a hint of his old imperiousness.

It was like a wash of relief down Alfred's back. "On my way."

He had to go back to the meals room to get a cup. When he returned, Arthur had pulled a reader off the bedside table – he was sitting up now, what was _in_ that regen-gel? – and was tapping at it.

As Alfred came back in, Arthur looked up and set it aside. "Do you remember anything?" he said suddenly.

For once in his life, Alfred hesitated. Wasn't this the sort of thing that triggered the mind wipe? "About what?" He handed over the water.

"About –" Arthur broke off and looked like he was phrasing this very carefully. "About – any place you might have dreamed you lived once."

"304," Alfred blurted out.

Arthur stared at him. Alfred touched his own mouth in absolute bafflement. He'd had no intention of saying that at all.

"Maybe that's my- someone's apartment number?" Alfred said. He searched his memories, but he could pull up nothing else.

Arthur shook his head. "I shouldn't have asked," he said shortly. "I've been thinking too much about before and after, recently. I shouldn't. My programming doesn't like it."

"After?" Alfred said. He glanced up, to the grey, curved ceiling, and imagined the Cree ships high above. "Doesn't seem too likely we'll make it through to retirement."

Arthur snorted. "Retirement?" he said. Beside him, the reader beeped. "Try 'seventeen'."

"What?"

"Pilots disappear after they turn sixteen," Arthur said. "What do you think happened to the last pilot of Eagle? In morning briefing they said he was transferred, but I've checked every scrap of the net we have access to – and that's all the military net, so it should be there – and he doesn't exist anymore. One place I hacked through to listed him as deceased."

Alfred could barely find the words from shock. "Have you told the others?"

"I can't," Arthur said. "Ludwig and Antonio and Romano are too deep in the programming. They wouldn't believe me. Feliciano would just panic. I have no idea what Gilbert and Roderich would do." He turned back to his screen. "You turned fifteen seven months ago," he said flatly.

"How do you know that?" Alfred said, still bewildered and trying to process all of this.

"_I know you_," Arthur said, fierce and unexpectedly desperate. "Don't I? It's all I can think of when I look at you – this nagging familiarity. Don't tell me!" he said, putting out a hand as Alfred opened his mouth. "We'll both trigger our mind wipes."

Alfred sagged. "I don't know much more," he said. "I wish I did. How's your back?"

"Healing," Arthur said. At Alfred's appealing look, he grudgingly twisted to the side and let him pull down the overalls and have a look.

"Your cuts – it looks like half a day's passed," Alfred said slowly. He wasn't sure if he was reassured by this or nauseated. The fact that you could just _reset _someone's body like that made the hairs on the back of his neck twitch.

"Pleasant, isn't it," Arthur said, pulling back up his overall and twisting back. "Pleasant like cyanide ice cream."

"You know ice cream is a food?" Alfred said. Food was supposed to be ration blocks.

"I get – flashes," Arthur said warily. Alfred knew the feeling. They were treading on the edge of the mind wipe. "Nothing concrete." On the bedside table, the reader beeped, more urgently this time.

Alfred picked it up to hand it to Arthur, glancing at it as he handed it over. He blinked and stared harder. The reader was crowded from edge to edge with code windows. "What are you running?" he said. That wasn't a battle sim or any of their training programs.

Arthur snatched the reader away from him. "I was trying to pick up traces of the guard that took me out," he said. "Life signs, call waves, transmissions from their ID bracelet – anything."

_Guard._ Alfred opened his mouth and then shut it again. Last time he'd tried to tell the others about an android, his whole mind had blanked. "Why?" he said, buying time to think of a way around it.

Arthur gave him a long, calculating look. Alfred realized he wasn't the only one trying to fool the mind wipe. "We don't get much contact with the rest of the military," Arthur said at last, and Alfred could hear a mountain of things he wasn't saying behind it.

The rest of the military. Where _were_ their commanding officers? Alfred felt a surge of desperation to tell Arthur about the androids, but he couldn't trigger his mind wipe and pass out now. Arthur needed him.

There must be a way. He tried to come at it sideways in his mind, concentrating on _not thinking_ about the words he was saying. "I don't think you'll get life signs."

Arthur's eyes came up sharply from the reader. "How do you—" He broke off, making a sharp movement with his hand as though cutting his own train of thought. _He's not surprised_, Alfred thought. _He's only surprised I've seen it too. _

The moment Alfred opened his mouth to say something about it, though, he could feel something pushing at his white memories, the dull grey lines of the rest of his brain trying to overwhelm them. He quickly changed what he was going to say. "They might have some sort of cloaking device, I mean," he said. "Might be standard for normal troops. We wouldn't need them 'cause we have the Aurea." _Don't believe me_.

"Yes," Arthur said flatly. "A cloaking device." He tapped new instructions into the reader. "It would be utterly stupid to suggest that the only real human is the one we see on the vid screens in briefing."

Alfred almost wanted to laugh, but it felt like laughing at a fatal depressurization. "Yeah," he said. "That would be a dumb thing to think."

Arthur seemed to come to a decision. He laid the reader on his bed by his leg, and it wasn't unless you looked at the tense line of the tendons in his arm that you realized he was nearly shaking. "Our communications are filtered," he said, carefully picking each word as if it was a delicate component and he was handling the bot slotting it into place. "The sites I reach on the net are geographically distant, if I'm reading it right. The nearby ones are – old."

_Don't think about it._ _Don't trigger the mind wipe. _Alfred tried to fill his mind with the feel of his Aurea. He could feel every strut and panel of Eagle, the wind thrumming past the metal as he climbed to the clouds. He let his words come out as if he didn't care about them in the slightest. "So, what do we do?"

"I don't know," Arthur said. His hand had bunched in the sheets, twisting them into disorder. "There are the Cree. We'd have to beat the Cree before – anything else."

Alfred frowned in thought. "Even if we did, we still can't get out," he said. "I checked the airlock while you were gone, it won't—"

His words choked off as sudden nausea swept through him. He bent over, letting his head rest on his knees, frantically blanking his mind. _Think of the Aurea. Think of Eagle._ He forced himself to pull up the feel of clouds slipping past him and Cree ahead.

It seemed to work. He forced his breathing into a slow and regular rhythm, and with each breath the nausea ebbed. There was a hand around his wrist.

"Alfred," Arthur was saying sharply, tightening his grip. "Concentrate, you bloody fool. Breathe. Don't black out on me."

"Not," Alfred managed. "Not blacking out." He pushed his head up, staring at the blurred square pattern on the floor. "I was just trying to say – I mean – the airlock –" The nausea rose again.

"_Stop_," Arthur said. Alfred broke off at the undercurrent of fear in his voice.

"Hey," Alfred said, trying to get his head straight enough to sound convincingly reassuring. "Hey, Arthur, it's okay, don't sound like that. Nothing's wrong. I just—"

"It will be wrong in a minute if you don't bloody shut up!" Arthur said. "Don't pass out and leave me here, you twat. I don't want to- I don't want to be on my own right now." The last words came out in a choked rush, Arthur scowling furiously down at his reader.

And suddenly, just like that, things seemed very simple. Alfred straightened his back, forcing himself to not feel sick. He had to think about the problem of getting out, but he didn't have to say anything yet. Not when Arthur was still recovering. "I'm fine," he said, his voice firming up, "and I'm not going anywhere." Arthur was still scowling, and Alfred put his hand on Arthur's forearm to distract him. "Hey. It's gonna be okay somehow, I promise."

He saw Arthur's chest move fractionally as he let out a breath. "No, it's not, you idiot," Arthur muttered, but it seemed more automatic than anything else.

They both seemed to realize at the same time that Alfred's hand had been on Arthur's arm for several moments longer than it had any right to. Arthur looked down at Alfred's hand. Consciously, slowly, his arm relaxed under the touch.

"It _is _soft," Alfred said, staring at the sandy hair by his hand.

Arthur's eyes flew up to meet his, deep green and startled. Stupid, stupid, _stupid. _He'd gone too far. What was he _doing_, anyway, trying to flirt with Arthur when Arthur didn't remember him? When he hardly remembered anything himself? Arthur didn't want anything to do with him that way, Alfred had messed everything up already, this was just—

"Hold this," Arthur said, and Alfred found the cool edges of the reader pressed into his hands, and Arthur's hand around the back of his neck, and Arthur's lips pressed to his.

Alfred felt his mouth part in sheer surprise. Little flickers seemed to be running down his whole body, as if a wire had been hooked up to his spine, but rather than burns it was shooting pleasant heat down his skin. He felt a slight hesitation from Arthur, as Arthur felt his shock. _Don't stop_, Alfred nearly said, but that would have required using his mouth to talk instead of the myriad things now tumbling through his mind that seemed like much better ideas. He put his arms around Arthur, the reader tumbling on the bed between them. He found he didn't have to think any more – he kissed hungrily, desperately and Arthur responded as if they'd only have this one chance in the world.

They broke away. Alfred's heart was thumping as if it was trying to break through his ribs. Arthur's hands were linked around his neck, pressing into his skin hard, and Arthur had his head down and was nearly shaking.

"Hey," Alfred said softly, putting his hands on Arthur's shoulders. "Hey, I'm not going anywhere."

Arthur gave a strangled laugh. "Everyone leaves."

"I'm not leaving," Alfred said urgently, although that made his stomach curdle, recollection hovering over his shoulder like a tracker missile. _I left before_. "I promise. Not again."

Arthur froze at _not again_, his breath coming fast and shallow.

"I _promise_," Alfred said.

Arthur gave a yank at his neck. It pulled them both back until they both tumbled against the thin headboard, Alfred sprawled gracelessly over Arthur.

"Sleep here," Arthur said fiercely. "The others won't care. Don't leave tonight."

"I'm here," Alfred said easily, shifting so they were both more comfortable. Something clattered to the floor. "Think that was your reader."

Arthur gave a quiet snort of real laughter. "You clumsy git. Move your leg."

Arthur's body was pressed against Alfred, and Alfred felt warmth where he touched. Alfred pressed himself closer, feeling cold creep down his back, as if Arthur was the only heat in the whole of a dark planet.

Arthur's head was nestled by his shoulder, but his eyes were distant. "You're sixteen soon," Arthur said quietly. "We have five months."

"No, we don't," Alfred said, without thinking. "We have five days."

Arthur stiffened, and his sandy head tilted back so he could meet Alfred's eyes. Alfred stared back, lost. His tongue seemed to have moved on its own.

"What?" Arthur said. "How do you know?"

"I don't know," Alfred said hopelessly. "I can't _remember_." He put his arms around Arthur suddenly, fiercely, and pulled him against his body as if he could protect them both from everything. But there were just the two of them, with aliens in the sky and androids who cut them up and memories like corrupted disks.

_Let the Cree come_, Alfred thought, as Arthur made a surprised sound and curled into the line of his body. _Let the androids come. I'm not letting him go again. _


	6. Chapter 6

The rotum smelt of smoke. Gilbert half-fell out of Shrike's hatch and raced down the stairs to where the wall had opened to a small medical wing. Ludwig carried Roderich into it and laid him down on a white bed that started rapidly staining with the blood blisters bursting through Roderich's overalls. They were thick on his hands and face, the only skin visible.

"Stay _back_," Arthur snapped, grabbing Gilbert's overall as he ran past. Repair bots were disappearing through Shrike's hatch, which was leaking smoke and the sickly smell of Aureus fluid. "Let the others get the gel on him!"

Gilbert didn't waste his breath but turned around in one smooth motion and punched Arthur in the face.

Or tried to. His fist smacked into Alfred's hand. "Leave him alone," Alfred said levelly. His hair was clinging to the back of his neck from sweat, he had a headache and his ears were ringing from the damage Eagle had taken going to the rescue in that dogfight. He was not in the mood for people fucking with Arthur.

"It should have worked!" Gilbert howled, rounding on Arthur. "You gave us the _wrong plan_, you stupid bastard! This is _your fault_!"

"No," Arthur said. His skin was an unhealthy shade of paper-white and his hands shook, but his glare wasn't any less intense. He smelt of smoke. "I said it was the plan with the best _chance _of success and getting both you and Edelstein out alive. I never said it wasn't risky." Behind him, Antonio and Ludwig were dealing with Roderich, packs of regen-gel in their hands.

"You said it was 60% sure to succeed!" Gilbert shouted. He was so upset he couldn't seem to remember how his hands hung, and shoved them in his pockets and tore them out. "That means it should have _worked_!"

"No, it means four out of ten times it _won't_ work," Arthur snapped. "You just ignore statistics that you don't like! We'll have to run it again—"

"To hell with your stupid tactics!" Gilbert said. "I'll take them all down and plant the damn tracker on the last survivor!" He went to push past Arthur to get back to the walkway, but Ludwig loomed up behind him, stepping away from the interface, and took his arm in a grip.

"You're not going anywhere," Ludwig said. "You're a liability at the moment."

"Those insect bastards _half killed him_," Gilbert said, somewhere between a human voice and an animal snarl. Alfred glanced at Roderich's unconscious body. Nobody had to ask who _him_ was when Gilbert said it like that.

"That's exactly why you're not going," Ludwig said. "You'll endanger your life and your Aureus."

Gilbert's voice went soft and dangerous. "Get out of my fucking way."

Ludwig stared at him. "No."

Alfred stepped forward to intervene. But before he could reach them, there was a swift movement and the _thunk_ of knuckles on bone.

Gilbert crumpled to the floor. Arthur shook out his hand, grimacing in pain.

"Kirkland!" Ludwig said. "Striking from behind is dishonourable!"

"You two were about to fight _anyway_," Arthur said. "And he's as good as you. I fight to win. Fast."

"Insubordination!" Ludwig said. "When Edelstein wakes up, we'll need Beilschmidt—"

"When Edelstein wakes up I _still _won't want Gilbert Beilschmidt anywhere near my plans," Arthur said. "You know how he gets when Edelstein gets hurt. I'll take—"

"Me," Alfred said, stepping up and putting a hand on Arthur's shoulder. "If you're running this crazy thing, you're taking me."

"_Not_ you," Arthur snapped. "Tracer will do."

"Why not me?" Alfred said. "Eagle's got twice Tracer's range."

"Because!" Arthur said, refusing to look at him.

A flicker of intuition sprung up at the back of Alfred's mind, incredulous. "Because _you_ don't want _me_ hurt if it goes wrong."

"This has nothing to do with that!"

"Hey, I'm hard to kill," Alfred said, giving his shoulder an affectionate shove. "Show me how we're going to do it."

()()()

Alfred insisted on midday rations first, and then let Arthur drag him to the simulators and bring up the programme he'd been working on in virtual reality. The simulators only used a light version of the Aurea fluids, which went in through one microneedle pad in the shoulder. Alfred connected himself up.

The pattern wasn't difficult in theory. Arthur made Lancaster an easy target for the faster Cree, and Eagle used its higher manoeuvrability to brush past one focused on Lancaster and plant this "tracker", which was a type of spybot Alfred had never seen before. The problem was making sure Lancaster survived that encounter. Roderich nearly hadn't.

They went through it in every conceivable combination of Cree ships except the big battle cruisers. "If they have those," Arthur said, "we call off. That's an emergency for Leviathan. We can't run risky manoeuvres in a heavy firefight."

"I thought this was risky anyway."

"It's forty percent risky," Arthur said irritably. "Run the pattern again."

The single microneedle pad in his shoulder wasn't draining Alfred as fast as a real Aureus would. He wasn't even aware of how much tiredness was fogging his reactions until he went to turn his simulated Aureus, facing down a Cree heading lazily for both of them. Easy target. But his mind wandered, and instead of engaging a long-range missile, a short-range materialised and exploded harmlessly in the visuals in front of him. He tried to frantically engage another one.

_"Alfred, above you!_" Arthur shouted.

There was a screeching whine. Alfred hammered at the button and the screen exploded around him, and then winked out.

Alfred pulled off the simulator helmet and yanked out the microneedle pad. Arthur stared at him from the other chair, his hair mussed from the helmet, his hand still on the cut-out button.

"Fuck," Alfred said, with feeling.

"Don't let that happen, you stupid git," Arthur said.

"I didn't mean to!" Alfred said, a sick, hollow feeling inside him. He'd kept the fear at bay until now, but now it hit him like a wave. He knew he'd be fine, but what if someone shot Arthur? What if Alfred couldn't stop them?

"Stop it," Arthur said sharply. "I know what you're thinking." He got up, dumping the helmet back in its slot, and pressed his hand on Alfred's shoulder as he passed. "Stop bloody worrying about me. Get some rest. We're on standby until the real ones attack."

()()()

The medic bots worked fast. Roderich was at evening rations, in obvious discomfort at having to sit up and move his arms, and having trouble concentrating on his food. Gilbert didn't say a word, but sat beside him and glowered at everything.

"I would kill for something different," Arthur muttered, unwrapping his ration cube.

"Pizza," Alfred said wistfully.

Feliciano looked up from his ration cube. "Pizza?" he said. "What's that?"

Alfred looked at him blankly. "You don't _know_?"

"Eh?" Feliciano said. He looked at Ludwig.

"It's a hovercraft model," Ludwig said firmly. Before Alfred could even start to deal with this, Ludwig was already frowning at Arthur. "Stop thinking and eat."

Arthur was shredding his ration cube into smaller and smaller pieces. He stopped when Ludwig spoke, but he didn't start eating. "I bloody wish we hadn't failed today," he said. "You know the last time we had a lull this long?"

Ludwig's eyes narrowed. "When?"

"Before the big wave last year," Arthur said. "I don't like it. What if there are only a few around because all the rest are being refitted?"

"Or what if we've finally whittled them down?" Antonio countered. "We'll get briefed if there's anything to really worry about."

"Not if the information's not there," Arthur said. "Damn it. I want that spybot on yesterday."

Gilbert bristled, and Antonio said warningly, "_Arthur_."

"Tomorrow will do," Arthur muttered. "But it had better _be_ tomorrow."

()()()

They had to wait thirty-eight hours before there was a Cree sighting. At the alarm, Alfred tumbled out of bed and dashed into the rotum just behind Arthur. But something wasn't right.

He and Arthur should be doing this solo, with Antonio and Romano standing by in the rotum as reinforcements. But on the walkway, the Aurea hatch at the end was already slamming shut.

Alfred frowned at it, trying to remember which one that was. He still hadn't got it when something hard knocked him aside, nearly winding him.

Ludwig shoved past him like an attack missile. "GILBERT BEILSCHMIDT!" he shouted. "GET BACK HERE RIGHT NOW!"

"It's too late," Arthur said, taking the stairs to the walkway two at a time. "He'll be linked up by now. Bloody hell," he added, through gritted teeth.

Alfred took a look at his face as he swung himself through his own hatch. "Aw, shit," he said. "That bad?"

"With a rogue Aurea in the field our probability of success has just sunk to 45.7%," Arthur said. "But we can't postpone this any longer. It's been too long already. Let's go." He pushed away and climbed through Lancaster's hatch.

Eagle's senses filled Alfred's brain as they roared up the launch tunnel and shot out only five miles or so from a dogfight. A group of small, fast Cree ships had managed to penetrate a long way into the defences, but now they had met Shrike. Gilbert's face, twisted with rage, appeared in front of Alfred as he emerged into the open air.

"Eagle to Shrike," Alfred said urgently. "Gilbert, stay out of our way."

"I'll take them all down myself!" Gilbert snarled, whirling on another Cree.

"Of course you will," Arthur said. "Carry on – the earlier you get shot down the easier it'll be."

"Hey, _teamwork_, Kirkland," Alfred said.

"I save it for when people are _doing as I say_," Arthur snapped. "Manoeuvre J-5! Positions!"

"Ten-four." Alfred banked steeply, bringing Albatross around into a gaggle of Cree and scattering them. Behind him, Arthur dived and zoomed up to gain speed.

Once Alfred was in position, he had to fight Eagle's natural instinct to gain altitude and take shots from above. It took him several minutes work his way around to one of the slower Cree in the group as he dodged and wove and pulled Eagle out of missile paths. But he reached it, hovering in the blue sky for one perfect moment, with Lancaster in exact range.

"_Now_," Arthur's image said.

"Evade," Alfred said, and pushed Eagle into a dive.

Arthur whipped Lancaster over the top of the Cree ship, making it turn to follow him in that sideways roll that the Cree ships were so bad at. Another, faster ship came to their rescue, and Alfred cut across its path. Fifty metres. Twenty. He had the tracker lined up in the missile slots, and in a puff of smoke it was away. The Cree fired back, but Alfred had already thrown Eagle into a barrel roll.

There was a moment of smoke-filled confusion, and a split second later Alfred and Arthur were clean away, a grin splitting Alfred's face.

"Hey, Kirkland, we _rock_," he said. "Now let's clean this lot u-"

Arthur wasn't looking at him. His eyes were unfocused. Alfred saw too late what he was paying attention to: Gilbert flying dangerously low, and the deltoid shape of a Cree rush-fighter above him, lining up for a shot.

"Shrike!" Arthur shouted. "Gilbert, you bloody fool!" He dived down after him.

Something prickled on Alfred's back. He didn't know if it was his reaction or Eagle's, but it made him look up. Straight up.

There was the black, insect-like point of a stealth craft breaking the cloud above them. A double trap, Alfred saw, in one blinding moment: the rush-fighter was there as bait so the stealth craft could strike from above. It had broken the clouds now. Arthur could see the missiles nestling under its wing. Pointing straight at Arthur.

"_Arthur!"_ Alfred kicked Eagle forwards. He could feel another Aureus coming out of the launch tunnel, but it wouldn't get here soon enough. Shrike was no use. The world seemed to slow as Alfred saw the stealth craft missiles fire out of their holders, and realised that he was so close he could slip into their path.

He flung out Eagle's wings and dropped. As he did, Antonio and Romano's Aurea burst from the launch tunnel and fired everything anti-missile gun they had. Alfred saw three of the four warheads dropping, and wondered if he was, by some miracle, going to get away with this.

And then the world went white.

()()()

Alfred didn't remember much after that. The dome of the rotum throbbed above him, sharp and then dull in his vision, while his body jolted across underneath it. There were voices around him, stretched tight with worry and anger. Someone let out a hoarse yell at every bad jolt and he wished they'd shut up. It was only when he was trying to listen to the voices he realised it was him.

That was Ludwig saying, "It failed?" and Arthur, furious, saying, "No. It worked fine. _Heroics_." Even in the blur around him, Arthur's voice was like splintering glass, pain and anger and the sickening crack of a load-platform crumbling._ Limit exceeded_. _Emergency measures required._ Alfred tried to reach out to him, but his hands didn't work.

"This is worse than Roderich," he heard Antonio say. _Well, shit_, Alfred thought, but he couldn't manage anything more coherent than that.

He remembered a kiss brushed on his forehead, later, on one of the only patches of skin that didn't hurt. He lay in the medical bay under the bright, white lights. The brightness and the pain seemed to open the space in his head. In the midst of the agony Alfred still waited eagerly for the memories, but all it disgorged was numbers. _Twenty eighteen eighteen three zero four eighteen eighteen twenty three zero four..._ Numbers. They danced around his vision, mockingly surreal, until the pain overcame him.

He woke up again – he thought it was a long time later – because there were low, frightened voices near him.

"You can't be serious," Ludwig's voice said, muffled, from the rotum. Alfred must have ended up in the medical bay.

"It's been sending data back for hours," Arthur said flatly. "I'm one hundred percent sure. They're massing in numbers we've never seen before." He wasn't even swearing. It sounded like he had gone beyond swearing.

"Where did they _come_ from?"

"Who knows where Cree come from? Maybe they bred them. It doesn't _matter_, Ludwig. Against a thousand ships, there's – there's nothing we can do."

"We can hold out," he heard Ludwig say bleakly. "Either the other outposts have been overwhelmed or we'll be reinforced."

"We'll be reinforced when hell freezes over," Arthur snarled. "They're all dead or retreated."

"Kirkland!"

"Then tell me why I've had no answer to any of my emergency calls!"

"You shouldn't have sent those! We're forbidden contact with—"

"With what? The deserted outposts and empty domes out ther- _ah!_" Arthur broke off with a cry of pain that Alfred recognised as the mind wipe kicking in.

Alfred tried to move, but the smallest effort set off bursts of pain flowering behind his closed eyes. He had to cling onto the voices to stay conscious.

"See if we can get it the dispenser to give more regen-gel packs for Roderich and Alfred," Ludwig said brusquely, and someone's footsteps went off to do it. "We'll need everyone."

"At least you got the tracker on," Antonio said, his voice small.

"Yes," Arthur said savagely. "We can die in full knowledge of what's to come."

_I have to do something, _Alfred thought, but he was falling away again.

()()()

Alfred nearly surfaced few more times, but something was stopping him. The useless numbers were flying around and clinging to him, tangling his mind like cobwebs, sticking his eyelids shut.

He managed to force them open a crack, although his vision was still blurred and he couldn't piece a thought together. When he did, he knew why he'd woken as far as he had: Arthur was sitting by his bed, shoulders slumped and elbows on his knees. Somewhere in the distance, there were alarms. Alfred tried to say something but his lips only twitched to shape soundless numbers. _Eleven three-oh-four. Twenty._

"You said you wouldn't leave," Arthur whispered. His head was bowed, his voice ragged and exhausted. "You promised me, Alfred."

_So much for heroics. _The thought lanced white-hot through the fog of numbers. It hurt. Every part of the realisation hurt. Alfred thought he'd just done everything a hero should do. But it wasn't enough.

_It's not about me_, he thought. _I'm a fool. I thought it was all about me being a – being a stupid great hero. I've done everything wrong. _

He felt like his mind was cracking under the weight of his failure. He would give up being a hero forever if he could find _anything_ that would help Arthur. But all he had was a body that couldn't move and thoughts drowned in useless _numbers—_

And then something clicked.

Alfred realised _everything_.


End file.
